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  • Reading the Scriptures with the Reformers by Timothy George
  • David M. Whitford
Reading the Scriptures with the Reformers. By Timothy George. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic. 2011. Pp. 160. $16.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8308-2949-1.)

In 1996, Mark Noll (whom author Timothy George counts as a friend, p. 257) published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he argued that the problem with the evangelical mind was that not many evangelicals used it. George’s book is in some ways a corollary or echo to that 1996 book. The evangelical problem that George seeks to overcome is twofold. On the one hand there is the scandal of the modern—the superiority of contemporary life to premodern life. In evangelical circles this can be seen in a rejection of much of “traditional” church services in favor of “contemporary” or “praise services,” and in a rejection of Tradition more generally. On the other hand, there is a thread of evangelicalism that asserts that all one needs to interpret properly scripture is the text itself.

This book is thus somewhat of an apology, written by an evangelical to evangelicals, for the value—indeed, the necessity—of reading scripture with the Reformers. It was, according to George, in the Reformation that scripture was returned to its proper place at the center of Christian life—“The Protestant Reformation was a revolution in the original scientific sense of that: the return of a body in orbit to its original position” (p. 17f). Following an introductory chapter on the difference between the ways in which the Reformers read the bible and the modern historical-critical method are seven chapters that retell the history of the Reformation from the perspective of the centrality of the Word of God to the Reformers. George begins with the dawn of Renaissance humanism and the important work of Lorenzo Valla in critiquing, then criticizing, and finally improving upon the Vulgate of the fifteenth century. In the next chapter, George turns to Desiderius Erasmus’s discovery of Valla’s Collatio novi testamenti in 1504 that eventually set him on the path to the creation of his own revision of the Vulgate together with a Greek text published in [End Page 344] 1516 as the Novum Instrumentum. This leads into a chapter on sixteenth-century bibles, the debates over revising the Vulgate, and the publication of vernacular bibles. Next, George considers the work of Martin Luther, the immediate followers of Luther, and then Zwingli and the emergence of the Reformed and Anabaptist voices of the Reformation. In each of these chapters the centrality and importance of scripture to the life and work of the reformers is lifted up.

The final chapter turns to the question raised by the book’s title. This book is not a standalone work, but rather the first volume in a planned twenty-eight volume Reformation Commentary on Scripture set. For each book of the (Protestant) Bible, comments, exegesis, and insights from a wide variety of Protestant (and the occasional Roman Catholic) sixteenth-century writers will be compiled and presented. The aim, as explained in the final chapter, is to aid preaching. Fides ex auditu (faith comes through hearing), and thus the call of the Church is to proclaim God’s Word. George’s apology to evangelicals ends by asserting, “Our task is to point men and women both to the written Word in Scripture and the living Word in Jesus Christ” (p. 258). He believes that the Reformers still have much to offer those given this task.

David M. Whitford
Baylor University
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